Twenty-Six Seconds

INTRODUCTION

When I was eleven years old, I went looking for my grandfather in William Manchester's book The Death of a President. I'm not sure how I knew that I would find him there. I found the book by looking it up in the old card catalog in my elementary school library. I pulled the thick, black-covered volume off the shelf and sat on the floor between the stacks to read it. I vividly recall flipping to the index, turning the leaves until I reached the last page, and scanning the Ys and Zs until I landed on the words I sought: Zapruder, Abraham. It was thrilling to see my own last name in print and in the satisfyingly long list of pages on which my grandfather was mentioned. I read the pages stealthily, consuming the few details about his personality and about what happened to him just before, during, and after President John F. Kennedy was killed.

I had no occasion to revisit those pages until more than thirty years later, when I was writing this book. When I did, I was shocked to see his story embedded in an incredibly gory account of the assassination, which I must have read at the same time. I don't remember that at all. Neither do I remember reading the short paragraph in which Manchester described Jackie Kennedy and my grandfather in the same sentence, though that is the sort of proximity to fame and pathos that would normally have attracted my attention. What impressed itself on my memory was the image of my grandfather, crying and screaming over and over, "They killed him! They killed him!" I remember the description of him at his office, anguished and in shock, slamming the door and kicking "every object that would move" in rage and fury. I read that he was, in Manchester's words, "a casualty, one of the weekend's walking wounded," so traumatized that, unlike nearly everyone else, he shunned the TV news coverage of the assassination and the funeral. I remember reading these pages over and over again, drawn to and horrified by the idea of my grandfather so broken and filled with sorrow. And I distinctly remember wishing there was more to read, feeling that these tantalizing fragments of his story were not enough.

I never knew my grandfather. Papa Abe, as he was known in our family, had died when my twin brother, Michael, and I were ten months old and our older brother, Matthew, was not yet three. Unlike my three living grandparents, who were a big part of my life, Papa Abe existed for me in his absence, as if our family were a great big smile with one giant missing front tooth. My sense of him came mostly from the stories my parents told and his one-liners that became stock phrases in our family's private language. Our dad loved to tell how Papa Abe would drop him off at school and always say the same thing: "Got any money?" Our dad would say yes. Papa would hold out his hand, palm up, and shoot back, "Then gimme some," and laugh at his own joke. He was endlessly curious about how things worked and terrific with his hands, rigging up gadgets and rewiring the electrical systems around the house, frequently with hilarious results. The family's longtime friend Ada Lynn used to say that he tinkered with the wiring so much that she was afraid she would ring the doorbell one day and the house would blow up. He loved to talk, equally happy debating politics and world events as he was discussing philosophical or existential matters. He was a born musician who never had a lesson and could play by ear; he came home from work every day and sat down to play the piano before even taking off his hat. He was a keen observer and social commentator, predicting, for example, that people were getting so used to doing things by pushing buttons that, in the future, babies would be born with only one finger. I can still see the wistful smile that crossed my dad's face when Papa Abe came up in conversation, and hear his laugh, laced with regret and grief from a too-early loss. I loved when my father remembered him aloud at the dinner table, and I wanted the night to stretch on long in the telling.

Of course, I also knew that he had taken a home movie of President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. I have no memory of learning this fact; it seems to me that I always knew it. I also knew his movie was called the Zapruder film, and Zapruder was my name, too, which in my childhood brain meant that I was famous, although I definitely knew I wasn't supposed to think that. This part of his life never came up at the dinner table. "The film"—as it was always called in our family vernacular—was almost completely compartmentalized from our family identity, our stories, and our sense of ourselves. It's extremely difficult to describe what I mean by this or even to fully untangle it in my memory. It's not that the topic was forbidden or suppressed or that the film's existence was denied or ignored. That is a too-blunt way to describe something far more subtle. But I knew—we all knew—that the grown-ups really didn't want to talk about it. Why was another story. I'm sure I never thought to ask. It simply existed somewhere offstage, there and not there, fascinating and a little bit scary.

When I was very young, I accepted this without question, as children tend to do. The film generally only came up when a stranger in a bookstore, at the grocery, or in the airport would recognize our name and ask my parents: Isn't that a famous name? Wasn't that the guy who…? Are you related? And I remember with a visceral clarity how they responded. I would watch as my father deflected the question, smiling graciously and offering a firmly closed-ended response, so different from his usual warm, embracing enthusiasm. I saw how my mother, unfailingly charming in other public situations, would tense slightly, and she would say, "Yes, it is a famous name." Even I understood that this polite but noncommittal answer telegraphed a resistance to further discussion, buying her enough time to finish signing the slip, smile, and escape the shop without getting embroiled in a conversation.

In addition to what I absorbed from our family culture and watching my parents, I remember a few very clear messages that were conveyed to me—to all of us, I think—about the Zapruder film. First and foremost, whatever the rest of the world thought, Papa Abe was remembered in our family for his true self, not for anything having to do with the film. I must have heard my mother say a hundred times, "Your grandfather should have been famous for who he was, for being a good person and a funny, wonderful man, and not for the film." Surely this feeling came naturally to my parents, but it was handed down as an imperative to us. Second, we don't brag about the film. It is a gruesome, horrible record of President Kennedy's assassination, which was a tragic event for the country and the Kennedy family. It is nothing to be proud of. Third, we are tied to the film by chance and coincidence. It was an accident of fate. It happened to be taken by our grandfather and it happened to be called by our name. Apart from that, it has nothing to do with us. Now, as an adult with children of my own who bear my last name and who have innocently bragged about it just as I did, I understand and even appreciate the wisdom of this guidance. Well, the first two parts at least. That third one—it has nothing to do with us—would turn out to be more of a wish than a fact. But I didn't know that at the time.

When I think back on it now, I imagine our family identity as a Venn diagram in which the overlap between the Zapruder family and the Zapruder film was neither clear nor fixed. When viewed from inside our family, the film was marginal, of little significance compared to the memory of a beloved patriarch who died too young. But strangers' curiosity and prying calls from the media had a way of pushing it into view, emphasizing our family's connection to the film in ways that were hard to ignore. If, in childhood, family identity is primarily defined by the tastes, interests, and values of parents, adolescence brings about questions and change. As I got older, I must have wondered about this thing called the Zapruder film: Why did people keep bringing it up if it wasn't all that important, and what did other people know about it that I didn't? On the other hand, my parents had already told me where the film stood in relation to our grandfather and how we should regard it, so I hesitated to ask them again. Eventually, caught between my own curiosity and my sense that a conversation with my parents would never fully satisfy me, I went rogue in the school library with William Manchester instead.

My parents and my brothers and I used to travel to Dallas to see my father's family once or twice a year. I adored our grandmother and my aunt (my uncle died when I was very young, so I have only a few sweet memories of him), but the best part was being with my four older cousins—Jeffrey, Adam, David, and Aaron—who were always known collectively as "the boys." Since I was the last grandchild and the only girl on that side of the family, they spoiled me, constantly hugging and kissing me, playing with me, teaching me to play pool, and giving me Juicy Fruit gum. It was heaven.

My memories of our time together as a family in Dallas remind me that there are two families who make up the descendants of Abraham Zapruder. Abe and Lil had two children—Myrna and Henry. Myrna changed her name when she married Myron Hauser, so their four boys are Hausers, as well. My father, Henry, married Marjorie Seiger, who became Marjorie Zapruder, and my brothers and I grew up as Zapruders. This otherwise innocuous fact matters because this is not just a story about family but about the inheritance of names, and how it shapes identity and life experiences. Since our grandfather's film very quickly became known as the Zapruder film (to distinguish it from the other films taken that day), and the name is, by coincidence, nearly unique in America, the five of us who bore the name were linked to the unique record of the Kennedy assassination in a way that was different from that of our Dallas family.

For this reason, there is no singular experience of our family's relationship to the Zapruder film. Throughout this book, when I refer to "our family," I generally mean the immediate family and descendants of Abraham Zapruder, whether they are named Zapruder or Hauser. This is because we are a close family with a shared fate, and what happens to one of us happens to all of us. Nevertheless, there are other times when I have written about the particular experience of my immediate family, which is unique not just because of our name but because it was our father, Henry, who handled the film for twenty-five years and who bore the primary emotional, intellectual, and logistical responsibility for it. Finally, and most frequently, I have written from my own perspective, endeavoring to recall my experiences and memories of growing up with the film as truthfully and accurately as I could. Some of my memories or feelings may echo those of my siblings or other family members, while others may be completely different. In the end, we each experienced the film and its effect on our lives uniquely, as all members of a family do with their respective pasts.

I did not end up nurturing a secret interest in the Zapruder film after my clandestine reading of The Death of a President. Far from it. My curiosity must have been more or less satisfied, because I rarely thought about the film through most of my teens, in college, and after. It was not because I suppressed it; to the contrary, it genuinely didn't occur to me to dwell on it. Of course, strangers still sometimes asked about the film, or the media would suddenly seize upon it, but this no longer intrigued me. By the time I was in my teens, I found myself more surprised by this than anything else. I suppose by then I had absorbed my parents' feelings about it—I took it for granted as a part of our family's history but I did not see it as a defining element of my life or identity. For this reason, when strangers asked about the film, I often felt they were imposing their curiosity on me in a way that could be intrusive or even embarrassing. In this regard, the association of our name with the film felt a bit like having an unsightly birthmark—it was something we were born with, but it didn't define us. I was used to it and no longer particularly noticed it. But I didn't expect people to point it out, either.

It became increasingly difficult to avoid the topic of the film in the 1990s, when events pushed it more into the news and the public eye than it had been at any other time in my life. First there was Oliver Stone's movie JFK, and then the film was parodied on Seinfeld. There followed a long public period (examined at length in this book) during which our family and the federal government tussled over the ownership of the Zapruder film, its copyright, and its monetary value. There were routinely articles about our family in the Washington Post and the New York Times. While some of the media coverage was balanced and reasonable, I also heard my family's motives and morality casually critiqued on NPR and by idols of mine like Doris Kearns Goodwin. Closer to home, a mean-spirited article in our local Washington City Paper accused my grandfather, my father, and our family of shamelessly profiting from the president's murder. A professional colleague at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where I was working at the time, challenged me on our family's policy regarding permissions to use the film, coldly pointing out that "we" charged high fees for its use. Stung and embarrassed, I tried to defend my father but realized that I had no idea what I was talking about. When our family and the government at last reached a resolution on the ownership of the film in 1999, I opened Yahoo to check my e-mail and found a poll question on the home page in which the public was invited to vote on whether they felt the Zapruder family deserved the amount of money awarded for the film. At the time I saw it, 18,000 people had already weighed in. The news of the decision aired on every network and on shows such as Entertainment Tonight, and my father was deluged with media wanting interviews. As much as I cringe at the memory, I now know that what I read in the paper and experienced for myself was, in fact, only the tip of an iceberg that my father was trying to steer us around.

And then, in the way that such things happen, it was over. The controversy died down and, mercifully, the media went on to other news and the public forgot about the whole thing. My brothers and I began our careers—mine in nonfiction, my twin brother Michael's in music, and our older brother Matthew's in poetry. I got married. Our parents worked, traveled, hosted evenings with friends talking politics, laughing, and drinking wine, and pursued their own interests: my father sailing and playing guitar, my mother taking photographs. We spent holidays and vacations together as a family. We went back to being the Zapruders, as we had always been. And if we didn't have to think much about the Zapruder film anymore, so much the better.

In September 2004, days after my husband and I learned that I was pregnant with our first child, my father underwent a biopsy that showed that he had a malignant brain tumor. We had known since the previous April that he was ill, but nothing compared to the crushing blow of his diagnosis. The shock sent reverberating shudders through our family and our wide circle of friends. He was just sixty-five at the time.

At some point early in his illness, he told me that someone should interview him about the history of the film. I suppose he realized that he was very sick and that, since he had been the primary actor on our family's behalf for everything that had to do with the film for so many years, he felt he should record his vast knowledge of it before it was too late. But it was a pipe dream; the idea reflected the wishful belief that life was going to continue as it always had, that his illness was an abstraction that would not actually have implications for our lives. As his cancer progressed with shocking rapidity, whatever fleeting thoughts I had of recording his memories regarding the film receded into the background. For one thing, to interview him at all was to face the fact of his impending death. It seemed impossible to accept it myself, let alone to ask him to acknowledge it so openly, to tell me things that he would not be alive to say later. Beyond that, the most articulate, precise, gifted talker I ever met lost his language incredibly quickly, and while his memory might have been intact inside his diseased brain, the cancer took from him his greatest intellectual gift, which was to translate his ideas into spoken language. Most of all, his illness and death—and, simultaneously, my first pregnancy and the birth of our daughter—occupied every cell of my being during that time. I was far too wrapped up in trying to soak up every minute I could with him—and eventually, helping him die with dignity—to give a thought to the Zapruder film. Luckily for our family, the cancer never robbed him of his gentleness and sweetness, of his love and generosity. But it did take his life far too early, like his father before him, and with it, among many other things, a vast personal and intellectual understanding of the history of the Zapruder film.

In the years following my father's death, I was periodically visited by the idea that I should do something to capture and record the history of the film from our family's standpoint. Surely it was his death—the sense that so much had slipped away—that gave rise to this impulse to collect what I could and to put some order to this narrative in whatever way was possible without him. I knew there were family papers about the film, voluminous legal documentation, and family and friends who had been involved in its history but who had never spoken publicly about it—and probably never would unless one of us asked them to.

My father's sister, Myrna, her son Adam (also an attorney, who had worked with my father on the conflict with the government), and my mother all shared this sense of responsibility. Periodically, one of us would raise the subject and all would agree that we should gather the family's papers, catalog them, and make sure they were stored somewhere safe. I would resolve to take it on, but somehow, the forward momentum always stalled and stasis would set in. Then, months later, I would wake in the night with a sudden panic: The documents were scattered, there were materials in my mother's attic, what if something got lost or damaged? Who was going to interview my father's personal secretary, the intellectual property attorney who had represented our family for more than a decade, and my father's friends, not to mention my mother and my aunt and all the others?

I would plan to begin again. But before I got very far, I would realize once more the logistical complications of this effort and the massive, daunting nature of the subject matter. I would quickly get overwhelmed and lose heart, and then the whole thing would drift away from me. Along the way, our daughter turned three and our son was born. Life was full and busy. It was not the time, I told myself. I didn't have the mental wherewithal to organize my refrigerator, let alone the Zapruder family's history of the Zapruder film, even if it was only for our family and for posterity.

Which I already knew it wouldn't be.

If I'm being truly honest with myself, I have to admit that on some level, I felt that taking even the smallest step in this direction meant taking on more than just organizing the family's papers. I'm a writer. I am drawn to the study of history and I am especially curious about how simple narratives conceal much deeper, more complicated and interesting truths. It was hard to see how inviting this subject into my life wasn't going to end in my wanting to write a book about it. I had no idea what kind of book it would be or what I would find if I dug into this history; I just knew that there would be questions and that I would want to find answers. At the same time, the thought of publishing a book—that most public of actions—flew in the face of at least one central life principle about the Zapruder film, which was that we did not invite conversation about it. I could see the conflict looming from a hundred miles away.

As if that weren't enough of a deterrent, along the way I was going to have to study the history of the Kennedy assassination—a subject I had avoided my entire life—and confront the immense, unspoken complexities of the Zapruder film. People spend their lives on this topic. I hardly knew a thing. Not only that, but my father and my memory of him were imprinted on every part of this story; in order to learn and tell it, I would also have to invite him back in, only to endure his loss again, to face my unanswered questions, and to risk the grief that still sometimes brought me to my knees. And so it would go. I would run through all the reasons that this was a terrible idea. I would parse out all the ways that I didn't want to do this. I would push the thought aside and leave it all for another day. And it would always come back.

My brothers—both of them gifted artists—have been the staunchest supporters of my writing. They encouraged me in my earliest thinking about this book, though they understood better than anyone the inherent problems that it raised. In 2010, my twin brother, Michael, sent me a quote from José Saramago's novel The Cave.

I taped this quote up above my desk where I could see it every day. And somewhere along the way, I found myself pulling the end of the thread, telling myself not to worry about the knots and tangles but just to follow it along for as long as I could. I began gathering the material records of the film—requesting copies of documents from our attorneys and going through my father's old files in our attic, bringing home papers, letters, and photos from my aunt's home in Dallas. I went to the National Archives and began wading through the government papers about the film. I also began reading the seminal books about the Kennedy assassination to get some purchase on the events of November 22, 1963, and its aftermath and poring over the handful of books and hundreds of articles about the Zapruder film. I started to interview close family friends, my father's colleagues, and others from our inner circle who could offer insight into the life of the film. I had lunch with my father's friends and asked them my questions. I see now that I was practicing the act of talking about the film—such an unfamiliar and uncomfortable experience—with the people I trusted, trying to locate and follow the strands that I knew ran through its history.

Immersing myself in this material was anything but simple. It was an exercise in learning, calibrating, and interpreting at the same time. As I read, I was amazed at how much I didn't know—the sheer breadth of the life the film had had without my realizing it. It was not just my grandfather's story, or even that of our family, but the centrality of the film's place in the Kennedy assassination debates, how it had challenged norms around the public representation of violence, how it triggered new debates about the media's role in protecting personal privacy or providing access to information, not to mention who should own and control the public dissemination of personal but historically relevant information. Added to this were all the ways the film had touched American culture, influencing some of the century's greatest and most provocative filmmakers, artists, and writers.

And then there was our name. Zapruder. The Zapruder film. Abraham Zapruder. Mr. Zee. The Z-Film. Henry Zapruder. The Zapruder family. Zaprudered. The Zapruder Quotient. The Zapruder Curve. I could not get over my astonishment at seeing it in print so often. The experience was distinctly different than it would have been if our name had been comfortably ambiguous, like "Smith" or "Cohen," shared with hundreds of thousands of others. But no. It was actually, literally our name, worn only by those who are descended from the man who shot the film. When people used the name Zapruder, there was no mistake about it. They were talking about us.

I often became overwhelmed by the implications of this research. I would find myself staring off into space, spinning out various strands of thought, trying out alternative narratives and struggling to wrap my mind around the immense significance of this object that bore my name but that I knew so little about. Sometimes, I could tolerate only a few pages of reading at a time. Sometimes, I had to abandon the books altogether and try again later. I frequently stumbled over information that I found upsetting. Sometimes, my reading illuminated aspects of the film's history I had felt but not known, or sensed but not understood. Sometimes, I found myself forced to think differently about parts of the past I thought I knew. And many times, more often than I liked, I faced characterizations of our family and interpretations of our actions that didn't tally at all with my knowledge and understanding of who we are.

This latter part was certainly the most difficult. I had an impending sense of dread each time I began reading about our family—a feeling that criticism was waiting in the wings. It usually was. As I turned the pages, I noticed how my body tensed and my jaw clenched. And when I realized that the topic had shifted to something else, I would find myself relaxing and breathing again. It took work to overcome my natural defensiveness about my family. Most frustrating of all, I didn't know our own story well enough to counter points of view that seemed wrong or unfair. It was very hard to stay present in the face of it all.

Over the course of this work, I began to see how our family's insistence on dignity and restraint when it came to talking publicly about the film had left a vacuum in the public story. Everyone but us seemed to own this narrative; each writer told the story and interpreted its meaning with his own facts, information, and perspective. But there was so much they didn't know. They did not know who my grandfather was and how his life experiences and personality shaped how he handled the film. They did not understand the deeply personal relationship between our grandfather and Richard Stolley, the LIFE reporter who bought the film from him the morning after the assassination, and how that relationship shaped LIFE's handling of it over the next twelve years. They did not understand why LIFE returned the film to our family in 1975 and the internal family dynamic that brought that about. They did not understand how our father thought about the film, and how he struggled to balance the public interest with his own private feelings about it, and how much our grandfather's wishes and imperatives shaped everything that followed. They did not know what took place behind the scenes during the 1990s when our family was negotiating with the government about the film. They could not fathom what it was like to be in my father's place, a Zapruder trying to strike the right balance between personal legacy and public responsibility for the Zapruder film. I might not know very much about the Zapruder film, but I knew a lot about the Zapruders. And I knew that no history of the film was complete without these threads woven into the story.